Physicists Want To Catch Mysterious Particles That Ran Away

It isn’t that long ago since the Large Hadron Collider was built on the border of France and Switzerland. But within a few years want to build another building to help in their studies of the Universe.

Large Hadron Collider
By Vieamusante CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons

This building won’t be as pompous as the kilometers of accelerator corridors but if the scientists are right this building might help them quite a lot in understanding particles and thus the universe. This experiment is known as MATHUSLA (Massive Timing Hodoscope for Ultra Stable Neutral Particles and its goal is to catch unusually long-lived particles brought into existence in the LHC.

MATHUSLA will cost pennies compared to what the LHC cost but it might solve the problems that the LHC is currently incapable of solving. The standard model of particle physics somewhat works. But it is still full of holes and hint that there be realms of physics we still haven’t even thought about. For example, one such hole is concerning the Higgs Boson. Its mass is lower compared to what the standard model predicted.

Some scientists, like Jessie Shelton from the University of Illinois, even acknowledge that apart from the discovery of the Higgs Boson, the LHC seems to be quite a disappointment. And we have tried. But, still, no other key particles have been discovered. And Jessie thinks that building bigger and more powerful accelerators might not be the best solution. We need a radical paradigm change.

And she has come up with such a paradigm change. She thinks that undiscovered particles actually get created in the LHC. We have just not been able to detect them. And that is because these particles exist for much longer than scientists thought they should exist. Instead of decaying inside the LHC detectors, they fly straight through walls, pass through a thick layer of granite and quietly decay somewhere in the forests near the Swiss-French border.

This is where the MATHUSLA experiment may come into play. If it was built in the area near the LHC the granite between the LHC and MATHUSLAmay shield most of the particles chaos from the LHC away but the missing particles may get through. And MATHUSLA, otherwise a 20 meters tall building filled with detectors might find some of them. It’s much simpler than building a new collider yet it might provide us with a completely new world of physics for a low low cost of 50 million dollars.

Sources:

• https://www.livescience.com/62633-lhc-stray-p

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